Apparitions and thought-transference: an examination of the evidence for telepathy. Frank Podmore
to reflect how recent is the growth of our scientific cosmos, and how brief an interval separates it from the chaos which went before. This may be seen even in Sciences which deal with matters of common observation. Amongst material phenomena the facts of Geology are assuredly not least calculated to excite the curiosity or impress the imagination of men. Yet until the middle of the last century no serious attempt was made to solve the physical problems they presented. The origin of the organic remains embedded in the rocks had indeed formed the subject of speculation ever since the days of Aristotle. Theophrastus had suggested that they were formed by the plastic forces of Nature. Mediæval astrologers ascribed their formation to planetary influences. And these hypotheses, with the alternative view of the Church, that fossil bones and shells were relics of the Mosaic Deluge, appear to have satisfied the learned of Europe until the time of Voltaire, who reinforced the rationalistic position, as he conceived it, by the suggestion that the shells, at any rate, had been dropped from the hats of pilgrims returning from the Holy Land. Yet Werner and Hutton were even then preparing to elucidate the causes of stratification and the genesis of the igneous rocks. Cuvier in the next generation was to demonstrate the essential analogies of the fossils found in the Paris basin with living species; Agassiz was to investigate the relation of fossil fishes and to show the true nature of their embedded remains. Nay, even in the middle of the present century, so slow is the growth and spread of organised knowledge, it was possible for a pious Scotchman to ascribe the origin of mountain chains to a cataclysm which, after the fall of Man, had broken up and distorted the once symmetrical surface of the earth;[4] for a Dean of York to essay to bring the Mediæval theory up to date and prove that the whole series of geological strata, with their varied organic remains, were formed by volcanic eruptions acting in concert with the Mosaic Deluge;[5] and for another English divine to warn his readers against any sacrilegious meddling with the arcana of the rocks, because they represented the tentative essays of the Creator at organic forms—a concealed storehouse of celestial misfits![6]
The subject-matter of the present inquiry has passed, or is now passing, through stages closely similar to those above described. "Ghosts" and warning dreams have been matters of popular belief and interest since the earliest ages known to history, and are prevalent amongst even the least advanced races at the present time. The Specularii and Dr. Dee have familiarised us with clairvoyance and crystal vision. Many of the alleged marvels of witchcraft were probably due to the agency of hypnotism, which in later times, under the various names of mesmerism, electrobiology, animal magnetism, has attracted the curiosity of the unlettered, and from time to time the serious interest of the learned. These phenomena indeed were made the subject of scientific inquiry, first in France and later in England, during the first half of the present century; have now again, after a brief period of eclipse, been investigated for the last two decades by competent observers on the Continent, and are at length winning a recognised footing in scientific circles in this country. Yet within the last two or three years we have witnessed the spectacle of more than one medical man, of some repute in this island, laughing to scorn all the researches of Charcot and Bernheim, just as their prototypes a generation or two ago ignored the results of Cuvier and Agassiz, and held it an insult to the Creator to accept the scientific explanation of coprolites.
And as regards the other subjects, to which must be added the alleged marvels of the Spiritualists, there have indeed been one or two isolated series of observations by competent inquirers, but for the most part the learned have held themselves free to ascribe the phenomena without investigation to fraud and hysteria, and the unlearned to "magnetism," "psychic force," or the Devil. For whilst men of science, preoccupied for the most part with other lines of inquiry, have kept themselves aloof, the vacant ground was naturally occupied by the ignorant and credulous, and by those who looked to win a harvest from ignorance and credulity. It is not of course implied that all persons who interested themselves in such matters came under one or other of these categories. There were many sensible men and women amongst them, but they lacked for the most part the special training necessary for such inquiries, or they failed through want of co-operation and support. No serious and organised attempt at investigation was made until, in 1882, the Society for Psychical Research was founded in London, under the presidency of Professor Henry Sidgwick. He and his colleagues were the pioneers in the research, and their example has been widely followed. Two years later an American society under the same title (now a flourishing branch of the English society) was founded in Boston; and there are at the present time societies with similar objects at Berlin, Munich, Stockholm, and elsewhere. Moreover, the Société de Psychologie Physiologique, which was founded in Paris, under the presidency of M. Charcot, in 1885, has devoted much attention to some forms of telepathy.
But the forces of superstition and charlatanry, to which this vast territory has been ceded for so long, have bequeathed an unfortunate legacy to those who would now colonise it in the name of Science; and the preliminary difficulties of the undertaking can perhaps most effectually be met by a frank recognition of that fact. On the one hand, a large number of thinking men have been repelled, and still feel repulsion, from a subject whose record is so unsavoury. On the other hand, the appetite for the marvellous which has been so long unchecked is not easily restrained. The old habits of inaccuracy, of magnifying the proportions of things, of confusing surmises with facts, cannot be eradicated without long and careful discipline. To one writer, indeed, those dangers seemed so serious that he solemnly warned the Society for Psychical Research, at the outset of its career, against the risk of stimulating into disastrous activity inborn tendencies to superstition, by even the semblance of an inquiry into these matters. Without going to such lengths, it may be conceded to the critic that even with those who endeavour to apply scientific methods to the investigation the mental attitude is liable to be warped by the environment, and that here, as elsewhere, evil communications may corrupt. As regards the actual investigators this difficulty is growing less serious, as more men who have received their training in other branches of science are attracted to the inquiry, and as the affinities of the subject to long-recognised departments of knowledge become daily more apparent. In another direction, however, this mental attitude presents still a more or less formidable obstacle. Many of the observations on which students of the subject are compelled to rely are derived from persons who have had no training in such habits of accuracy as are required in scientific research. When accounts of the ornithorhynchus first reached this country naturalists laughed at the traveller's tale of a beast with the tail of a beaver and the bill and webbed feet of a duck. In the same way scientific men for long refused to admit the existence of aerolites, as they now decline to credit the reports of a Sea Serpent of colossal proportions. In all these cases, so long as the alleged facts rest solely on the testimony of men untrained in habits of close observation and accurate reporting, a suspension of judgment seems to be justified. And if these considerations are valid in ordinary cases, a much higher degree of caution may be reasonably demanded of investigators who leave the neutral ground of the physical sciences to enter upon a field in which the emotions and sympathies are most keenly engaged, and in which the incidents narrated may have served to afford support to the dearest hopes and sanction to the deepest convictions of the narrator. So insidious, in such a case, is the work of the imagination, so untrustworthy is the memory, so various are the sources of error in human testimony, that it may be doubted whether we should be justified in attaching weight to the phenomena of telepathic hallucination and clairvoyance, to which a large part of this book is devoted, if the alleged observations were incapable of experimental verification. Certainly in such a case, though the recipient of an experience of this kind might cherish a private conviction of its significance, it would hardly be possible for such a view to win general assent.
In fact, however, the clue to the interpretation of the more striking phenomena, in the case of which, since they occur for the most part spontaneously, direct experiment or even methodical and continuous observation are rarely possible, is furnished by actual experiment on a smaller scale and with mental affections of a less unusual kind. The thesis which these pages are designed to illustrate and support is briefly: that communication is possible between mind and mind otherwise than through the known channels of the senses. Proof of the existence of such communication, provisionally called Thought Transference or Telepathy (from tele = at a distance, and pathos = feeling), will be found in a considerable mass of experiments conducted during the last twelve years by various observers in different European countries and in America. Before proceeding, in